Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

The hejabi woman clung to me, and I clung to her.

“Did it happen to you?” we babbled. “Did it happen to you—?”

“Don’t tell anyone,” I said, when we were brave enough to let go.

Carpazian was right, the stay of execution was over, and any haunting would have been better than this. We lived from moment to moment, under a sword.

H 15750, N 310, O 6500, C 2250, Ca 63, P 48, K 15, S 15, Na 10, Cl 6, Mg 3, Fe 1,

Trace differences, tiny differences, customising that chemical formula into human lives, secrets and dreams. The Buonarotti process, taking that essence and converting it into some inexplicable algorithm, pure information…

“We’ll have what we’ve managed to carry,” I said. “And no reason why we shouldn’t eat the meat and vegetables, since our bodies will be native to Landfall.”

“We could materialize thousands of miles apart,” said Hilde.

“Kitty says it doesn’t work like that.”

Kitty, the woman whose nickname had been ‘Flick’, had come out of a closet of her own. She was, as I had always known but kept it to myself, a highly qualified neurochemist. Take a wild guess at her criminal activities. I’d had to fight a reflex of disgust against her, because I have a horror of what hard drugs can do. She and Achmed knew more than the rest of us put together about the actual Buonarotti process. Achmed had refused to talk about it, after his first pronouncement, but Kitty had told us things, in scraps. She said teams like ours would ‘land’ together, in the same physical area, because we’d become psychically linked.

We were in Hilde’s cabin. She was lying on top of me in the narrow bunk, one of the few comfortable arrangements. It was the sixth ‘night’, or maybe the seventh. She stroked my nose, grinning.

“Oh yes, Captain. Very good for morale, Captain. You don’t know.”

“I don’t know anything, expect it’s cold outside and warm in here.”

I tipped her off so we were face to face, and made love to her with my eyes closed, in a world of touch and taste. My head was full of coloured stars, the sword was hanging over me, fears I hadn’t known I possessed blossomed in the dark. What’s wrong with her, what kind of terminal genetic error? Why was she condemned, she still has amnesia, what is it that she doesn’t dare to remember? Oh they will turn you in my arms into a wolf or a snake . The words of the old song came to me, because I was afraid of her, and my eyes were closed so I didn’t know what I was holding—

The texture of her skin changed. I was groping in rough, coarse hair, it was choking me. It changed again; it was scale, slithery and dry. I shot upright, shoving myself away from her. I hit the light. I stared.

My God.

“Am I dreaming?” I gasped. “Am I hallucinating?”

A grotesque, furred and scaly creature shook its head. It shook its head, then slipped and slithered back into the form of a human girl in a red nightdress.

“No,” said Hilde. “I became what you were thinking. I lost control—”

Hilde; something else, something entirely fluid, like water running.

“I told you I had a genetic disease. This is it.”

“Oh my God,” I breathed. “And you can read my mind?”

Her mouth took on a hard, tight smile. She was Hilde, but she was someone I’d never met: older, colder, still nineteen but far more bitter.

“Easily,” she said. “Right now it’s no trick.”

I fought to speak calmly. “What are you? A… a shape-changer? My God, I can hardly say it, a werewolf?”

“I don’t know,” said older, colder Hilde, and I could still see that fluid weirdness in her. “My parents didn’t know either. But I’ve thought about it and I’ve read about the new science. I’ve guessed that it’s like Koffi said, do you remember? The Buonarotti Transit takes what Carpazian calls the soul apart: and it has unleashed monsters. Only they don’t ‘happen’ near the torus—they get born on earth. The government’s trying to stamp them out, and that’s what I am. I didn’t mean to deceive you, Ruth. I woke up and I was here, knowing nothing and in love with you—”

I wanted to grab my clothes and leave. I had a violent urge to flee.

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I didn’t know! I found the nightdresses, I knew that was very strange, I tried to tell you, but even then I didn’t know. The memories only just came back.”

“Why did they send you out here? Why didn’t they kill you?”

“I expect they were afraid.” Hilde began to laugh, and cry. “They were afraid of what I’d do if they tried to kill me, so they just sent me away, a long, long way away. What does it matter? We are dead , Ruth. You are dead, I am dead, the rest is a fairytale. What does it matter if I’m something forbidden? Something that should never have breathed?”

Forbidden, forbidden… I held out my arms, I was crying too.

Embrace, close as you can. Everything’s falling apart, flesh and bone, the ceramic that yields like soft metal, the slippery touch of satin, all vanishing—

As if they never were.

Straight to orientation, then. There were no guards, only the Panhandle system’s bots, but we walked without protest along a drab greenish corridor to the Transit Chamber. We lay down, a hundred of us at least, in the capsules that looked like coffins, our gravegoods no more than neural patterns, speed-burned into our bewildered brains. I was fully conscious. What happened to orientation? The sleeve closed over me, and I suddenly realised there was no reprieve, this was it. The end.

I woke and lay perfectly still. I didn’t want to try and move because I didn’t want to know that I was paralysed, buried alive, conscious but dead. Oh I could be bounded in a walnut shell and count myself the king of infinite space . I had not asked for a dream, but a moment since I had been in Hilde’s arms. Maybe orientation hasn’t begun yet, I thought, cravenly. The surface I was lying on did not yield like the ceramic fibre of the capsule, there was cool air flowing over my face and light on my eyelids. I opened my eyes and saw the grass: something very like blades of bluish, pasture grass, about twenty centimetres high, stirred by a light breeze.

The resurrected sat up, all around me: like little figures in a religious picture from Mediaeval Europe. The team was mainly together, but we were surrounded by a sea of bodies, mostly women, some men. A whole shipload, newly arrived at Botany Bay. The romance of my dream of the crossing was still with me, every detail in my grasp; but already fading, as dreams do. I saw the captain’s armband on my sleeve. And Hilde was beside me. I remembered that Kitty had said teams like ours were linked . Teams like ours: identified by the system as the leaders in the consensus. I’d known what was going on, while I was in the dream, but I hadn’t believed it. I stared at the girl with the cinnamon braids, the shape-changer, the wild card, my lover.

If I’m the captain of this motley crew, I thought, I wonder who you are…

Julie Novakova is a Czech author and translator of science fiction, fantasy and detective stories. She has published short fiction in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog , and elsewhere. Her work in Czech includes eight novels, one anthology (Terra Nullius) and over thirty short stories and novelettes. Some of her works have been also translated into Chinese, Romanian, Estonian, German and Filipino. She received the Encouragement Award of the European science fiction and fantasy society in 2013, the Aeronautilus award for the best Czech short story of 2014 and 2015, and for the best novel of 2015. Her translations of Czech fiction into English appeared in Strange Horizons and Tor.com . Julie is an evolutionary biologist by study and also takes a keen interest in planetary science. She’s currently polishing her first novel in English and translating more Czech stories into English. Read more at julienovakova.com.